The Language of Easter

Easter is so much more than a holiday: It's a cultural package. There's the Easter Bunny, Easter eggs, Easter candy, as well as special Easter customs, knick-knacks, and decorations. There is also an "Easter language", a subset of vocabulary used a lot in the weeks preceding and culminating on Easter Day.

Here is a sampler of the language of Easter along with its linguistic baggage.

basket: Who would have thought that the good old basket that holds our colorful Easter eggs would be of such mysterious ancestry? The word basket appears out of nowhere as late as the 13th century, in its current form no less. How did it get there? No clue. The Latin word bascauda (= washing tub) has been proposed as a possible ancestor of basket, but the jury is still out.

chick: The cute and chirpy Easter chick derives its name from a 15th century abbreviation of chicken, and means, quite predictably, "little fowl", "young chicken". The Indo-European ancestor of both chicken and chick is *kiukinam, from the root *keuk-, hence cockerel.

dye: Another mystery word... Its origins are as obscure as those of basket, if not even more so. Dye started out meaning "color". As simple as that. Nowadays it means "artificial coloring", as in egg dye and hair dye. How it got from meaning A to meaning B remains a puzzle to semanticists. Some experts have proposed a connection of dye with Old English deagol (= hidden), but this seems to complicate things even more. Another interesting fact in the very little we know of the history of dye is that it was spelled die until fairly recently (late 19th century). You can imagine the confusion with die, as in "pass away", hence the spelling differentiation.

Easter: Easter derives from east (the point of the compass), which goes back to the Indo-European root *aus, which has also given us aurora, dawn. (After all, doesn't the sun rise from the east?) Easter is also connected to Eastre, the Old English name of a Germanic dawn-goddess (cf. German Ostern, Easter).

egg: The oh, so very English egg is actually an Old Norse import. Once imported, egg had to push out the competition, the Old English eye, which was at that time the established word for "egg". Both egg and eye go all the way back to the Indo-European root *owo-, which has also given us the Spanish huevo. In the end, egg prevailed over eye, and this is why we now dye Easter eggs and not Easter eyren (or eyes...)!

resurrection: In the beginning there was a Latin verb, regere, which meant "to rule" (does the English regiment ring a bell?) and a Latin prefix, sub, which meant "below". They joined forces and gave us a new Latin verb, surgere, with the progressive meanings "to lead from below", "to lead up", "to raise", "to rise". This is the ancestry of resurrection, and also of source and resource.

Spring: Spring did not always signify the season after winter (the word Lent used to have this function). Its Indo-European origins have been traced back to a verbal root *sprengh-, which meant "to move very fast". From there it was a short leap (pun intended...) to the English meaning of the verb spring "to jump" and then to the meaning "to rise", say, like a stream of fresh water from the ground. As English speakers kept adding layer upon layer of figurative meaning, spring came to mean the season of the year when nature rises from its winter slumber and, with it, also rises the hope of new growth.

Source:
Merriam-Webster Online: http://www.m-w.com